Oh dear.  They're retro-cataloguing into Aleph, an obsolete, flat-file library system from the 1980s.  What a waste of time and effort, creating yet another ghetto of non-linked, unintelligent data.  Manuscripts are not printed books. Every manuscript is a unique antiquity.  Library systems are not the right tool for the job.

May I say clearly for all to hear.  Information concerning manuscripts, the literary works they supprt, locations, authors, scribes and owners should be recorded in a normalized relational database system.  Ideally, there should also be XML import and export (report) facilities, or the whole database may be an XML system.

A model for how to do this properly is the PanditProject.   There is, in fact, no reason that the Bayerische SB shouldn't retrospectively catalogue their Indian manuscripts into PanditProject itself.  That would actually be of huge immediate value to the international academic community of S. Asia scholars.  But an institution of the SB's size is probably too rule-bound and inflexible to consider such a procedure.

Best,

Dominik Wujastyk

University of Alberta